Neshama Carlebach, soul singer and leading superstar in Jewish entertainment will take the stage at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 8, at the White Theatre. Joining Carlebach at Congregation Beth Shalom’s Polsky Concert will be Rev. Roger Hambrick and members of the Green Pastures Baptist Church Choir. The 90-minute concert, which is free and open to the community, will be performed without intermission.
Carlebach is continuing the legacy established by her father Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. His deep spirituality and love of all humanity filled every song he wrote and touched every person he encountered as he changed the face of Jewish music. Neshama Carlebach deeply moves and entertains as she sings her father’s incomparable melodies and her own inspiring original compositions.
Carlebach’s seventh recording, Higher & Higher (Sojourn Records/Sony) is supported by the robust voices of the Green Pastures Baptist Church Choir, a Bronx-based African-American congregation. They’ve been touring together for the past few years.
Her most recent recording, “Every Little Soul Must Shine,” was commissioned by PJ Library, an organization that sends out books and CDs to Jewish families, including those in Kansas City, to strengthen Judaism in the home. The CD features songs in both Hebrew and English. It also features songs by her father as well as several songs by Tom Laverack and Mark Ambrosino, founders of Carlebach’s record label Sojourn Records.
The Jewish Exponent’s entertainment reporter Michael Elkin describes Carlebach as “a vision of verve and spirit on stage. It is a heavenly performance that Neshama Carlebach stages, an appropriate and triumphant tribute to her father.”
The San Francisco Jewish News also gives Carlebach a favorable review, saying “… Neshama Carlebach has emerged as one of the premier female singers in the genre of jazz/pop Jewish soul music. If that sounds like a big fish in a small pond, it is. But the daughter of the late Jewish mystic and music legend Shlomo Carlebach certainly inherited both the DNA and the pipes to dominate the field. Indeed, one need not even be Jewish to love the music of Neshama Carlebach, though after hearing her sing, one might want to be.”
The Polsky legacy
The second family legacy represented by the concert is that of the Polsky family.
Since 1995, the family of Isadore and Rachel Polsky has been paying tribute to their memory through a series of innovative educational and artistic events. Those events have been enthusiastically received not just by the members of Beth Shalom, but by the greater Kansas City community. The Neshama Carlebach concert is the 12th installment in the series.
The Polsky Jewish Enrichment Series, a part of the Rabbi Morris B. Margolies Center for Adult Jewish Studies of Congregation Beth Shalom, is funded by the Isadore and Rachel Polsky Endowment/Beth Shalom Foundation, provided by Elaine Polsky, Karen Polsky Kent, Larry and Ellen Polsky and Steve Polsky.
Harold Kaseff is the chairman of the event’s planning committee, which includes Rabbi Alan Cohen, Norm Levitan, Elaine Levine, Rod Minkin, Larry Kalender, Joan March, Berenice Haberman and Rhea Salasche. For additional information, call Levitan at 913-647-7283.